The _bureaux_ of notaries, of insurance agents, of exporters and importers, have been turned into offices for the army services. Officers with such alphabetical titles as I have mentioned above stride with a preoccupied air in and out of old houses whose dilapidated fronts and faded rooms breathe an atmosphere of fatigue that contrasts strangely with the bustle within. Here in a room that might have come out of an illustration of Du Maurier in _Punch_ of the seventies an officers’ mess is installed. Tins of cigarettes and tobacco stand on the mantelpiece, the _Sketch_ and the _Vie Parisienne_ lie about the tables, maps hang on the walls, in the depressing atmosphere created by an abundance of rubbed and dusty plush, of cheap brass ornaments, of soul-searing chromo-lithographs, of dyed grasses crammed into vases as big as drainpipes. Perhaps the word _mess_ conjures up for you a picture of regimental plate, of shaded lights, of red-and-gold uniforms. Banish it from your mind! “Cut it out!” Meals at G.H.Q. have only one excuse--viz., that man must eat. They are short and business-like, and the fare is plain. In this stern, hard-working North of France they have none of the amenities of French life. The wine is imported, and bad and dear at that; the cooking is atrocious; and as for cleanliness, I have dined in my time at many a humble eating-house in London where the food was served in a far more appetizing manner than I have seen it in the hotels in this part of France. Soup produced from soup squares, fish (on Wednesdays and Fridays, fish-market days) or macaroni, then roast beef or mutton (ration meat, and mostly very tough), followed by tinned fruit and coffee, is the average _menu_ of the messes at G.H.Q. Immediately after dinner everybody bolts back to his work. During the greater part of the day everything is in movement at G.H.Q. Except for the orderlies waiting for messages outside the offices, and officers here or there talking in the street, everyone seems to be moving. Cars come chug-chugging up the narrow streets, waved in and out by military policemen posted at the dangerous corners, with little coloured flags affixed to the bonnet signifying the formation to which they are attached. There are French cars, adventurous-looking cars, some of them, heavily coated with the mud of Arras or the Argonne, or maybe even the Vosges, bearing mysterious numbers and letters on their wind-screens. They stand there in the sunshine while their drivers, begoggled and leather-coated, chat with a French interpreter or two, with a friendly town policeman, or a uniformed messenger from the Banque de France. In the group there will surely be a British A.S.C. driver or two surveying the Allied car with that silent mien of unspoken criticism which is the attitude of the chauffeur the world over towards a car other than his own.